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It is plausible that an attack could be made by renting cpus for a couple hours for a few million bucks

It isn't plausible. Bitcoin mining leaders do it by dedicated hardware. Assuming your plan is renting general purpose GPUs on a computing cluster

Maximum Bitcoin Total Bitcoin Hashrate is 43EH/s https://blockchain.info/es/cha... (E stands for Exa = 10^18) For a 51% attack, starting from 0, you'd need to add another 43EH/s to the pool. The Nvidia Tesla S2070 has a hash rate of 749.23

You'd need to rent 57 Gigas of GPUs plus all the infrastructure to manage that. For context the third largest supercomputer has 18K of GPUs https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

I don't know if that amount of GPUs exists in the world, but if it does, the renting price hour is 70 cents / hour per GPU https://www.theregister.co.uk/... So you need an investment of 40 Trillion dollars if my math is ok Current bitcoin market cap is 130 Billions. https://charts.bitcoin.com/cha...

Renting specialized mining hardware is also not viable. Suppose there are enough miners available at renting for a 51% attack (which there aren't). By renting that hardware you're just displacing the demand for renting miners, so more miners are purchased to be added to the renting farms. You won't be able to rent miners fast enough to achieve the 51% attack. It's not like you'd have that amount waiting for you just for an hour.

It you are going to include other costs of money, you should do it for bit coin too. Include the cost of each computer the portion of each house taken to store that computer. Security for computers if you are storing millions of dollars on it they too should probably be stored in a safe. Cost of disposal of old hardware. Cost of bit coin exchanges. I would not be surprised combined hardware for mining bitcoin far surpassed that of banks, and probably replaced more frequently, since banks don't buy cheap servers where consumers do.

There are 500,000 (/charts/n-transaction) bit coin transactions per day there are 1,900,000,000 (reports/noncash) non-cash transactions. That is 3800 times more, say we linearly scaled up .5% energy use to cover all transactions leaving out things like creating and storage, cooling of the computers the miners would need to run on. That would be 1,900% of the current power used. I don't care what you throw in to the equation managing money doesn't use that much.

Most things can be explained very simply, this guy takes forever to say simple things, sounds more like a salesperson than a tech talk, I dont find him very convincing on that basis alone but whatever, to your points.

1. Takes him 10 minutes to say increase the blocksize and another 14 minutes to say Lightning network or sidechain.
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Blo...
Sidechains are divorced from the block so require other layers of trust and are therefore not blockchain.

2. complete waste of my time, was a sales pitch more than anything.

3. 51% attack is completely possible, in 2 cases especially.
        a. The network has fallen out of favor and everyone has moved on to the new bestest coin ever, and the only people left on the old garbage coin for slow people are just hacking it to get whatever 'value' they think they can steal and its trivial to have enough processing power.
        b. New super good coin is 'worth' a bajillion megabucks and now its trivial to spend 1 billion dollars to do an attack.

https://blockchain.info/pools
Only 3 of the top 4 pools need to conspire to further their own self interest, less than that is necessary for shorter term control of the network, even if they are able to disrupt the network for their own purposes with 30% of the hash rate.

One of the biggest failures of new technology, especially when advocates are vociferously certain that its so perfect and cannot fail is a lack of imagination, this has taken down the most secure certain absolutely guaranteed 'things' time and time again. Someone will find a hole and take advantage of it over and over in ways not originally even considered.

Maybe there is a simply a spam attack possible that delays all transactions for many hours or days.
Maybe there is a trust attack where proof appears from multiple sources.
When does a classic man in the middle attack become 'worth it', impersonate the work originator.
Who knows.

Thats if its not regulated out of use by governments in short order anyways.

4. was a sales pitch again.

In practice Bitcoin is a complete failure, too expensive, too slow, doesn't scale, too much risk, not convenient.
Blockchain may be interesting but V2.0 looks useless so far. No reason it can't be looked at some more but my original descriptions stand from where I sit.

I used 0.001 BTC as a round value to illustrate the problem. Currently I'm getting a suggestion of a $4 fee to send $10. Just slightly less insane than it used to be.

The mempool is sure as heck not empty, and hasn't been in a long time: https://blockchain.info/en/cha...

Bitcoin volume can't collapse in the current state because the blocks are always full. There's more people wanting to use the network than resources the network has, so a reduction in interest still results in full usage of what there is.

The whole spam argument is complete bullshit. The fees are high enough that it would cost insane amounts of money to send enough transactions to affect the network, and even if somebody did, guess what? Sending transactions is what the network exists for in the first place. If it can be defeated so trivially, it's just a bad design that should be replaced with something better.

It is? 97% of all bitcoins are held by just 4% of all addresses. With about 600,000 unique addresses, that means that 24,000 addresses control 97% of Bitcoin. It does take a small fraction of the total value of the currency to break it; witness George Soros doing it to the UK in 1992 (Black Wednesday) with $1 billion - against ~$300 in currency. That means about 0.3% of all Bitcoin would be all you need to break it, in terms of value. With so few controlling so much, there are bound to be many, many people with enough value to break the currency via shorts.

Current hash rate 1.2x10^19 Hashes per second (12am EST)- https://blockchain.info/charts...
Best miners - 10^9 Hashes per joule. https://shop.bitmain.com/antmi...

That took 2 minutes to look up and grade nine math knowledge of scientific notation. If you understand scientific notation you won't become a reporter.

As for Bitcoin, I don'know if I even want to use it now, in case it's involved in some way with my Firefox getting compromised and this weird extension showing up without me installing it.

I understand your frustration. And I can help. Just send your Bitcoin to this address: 1Q8HcFA3GgTuL1NWr6PYB6mtYgdFgXRfGc and I'll take care of the rest.

What mechanisms are in place (perhaps a trick question as I'm expecting the answer is "none) to prevent the exchange from telling all 5 customers "sorry it took a while, we could only get you $1k for your coin" and pocketing the extra $22k?

Because the entire blockchain is public record. Anyone can look at it. Example: https://blockchain.info/

Wonderful. The block chain is public record. So I can publicly see that "my" wallet transferred out 1 bitcoin, and 0.999 of it went to some other persons wallet and the remaining 0.001 of it went as a transaction fee to the miner's wallet. A few flaws in this:

1) it doesn't say anything about what the transaction price was, so unless I can identify the actual person on the other end and get a truthful answer from them, I have no way to know what price they paid

2) I understand bitcoin very well, but I'm not familiar with how the individual exchanges record their transactions directly on the blockchain. When you have your money at an exchange, do you even really have your own individually identifiable wallet on the blockchain, or is it stored in some sort of community wallet that's shared across all exchange members? The latter was my impression, because I seem to recall reading that when you buy on an exchange you don't have to pay bitcoin transaction fees unless you want to have the funds transferred into your own personal wallet off the exchange. I don't see how it would be possible in the current bitcoin environment to record a transaction on the blockchain free of fees unless the explanation was that the individual transactions aren't actually taking place on the blockchain but just within the exchange's private accounting. I'd love for someone more knowledgeable about the inner working of an exchange to be able to confirm or correct me on this. If my guess is correct, then you technically wouldn't even have your own distinct transaction on the block chain to verify anything at all.

The current exchange rate of the day. HSBC doesn't discount. If the exchange rate on that day is 9.187 HKD to 1 EUR, then that is the rate of the transaction.

Ok I used to work in a bank. The exchange they advertise already has margins to built-in to cover the fees. Other exchanges might have higher or lower rates depending on their margins.

As far as transaction time, I call bullshit. Blockchain itself says they average about 900 minutes, which would be about 15 hours. So a business day.

Not sure where you went to school, I downloaded the CSV from your link an calculated an average of 115 minutes.
Also worth noting, confirmation times are dependent on how many confirmations you require (ie smaller transactions may only need one, therefore take 10 minutes, larger ones may want 20 which could take an hour+).
Also worth noting, transaction times can be improved by offering higher fees, so you have the choice of faster or slower confirmations.
Also worth noting this is only Bitcoin which has a slower network than many other coins, eg for Litecoin it's 2.5 minutes.
All of this is better than waiting 1 business day which could mean as much as three days and you have no control over it.

And good luck using that decentralized currency in China, or soon-to-be several major economies who are choosing to ban Bitcoin and other "crypto" currencies. If you cannot send it at all, then how is it better? At least from HK, or the USA, I can send USD or HKD to any country anywhere, any time - without any restriction.

And do you know how your bank will be transferring to other banks overseas? That's right your bank probably already using blockchain for this, or has a prototype underway. Don't get caught up in the Bitcoin specifics, blockchain is taking over the finance world.
Blockchain will allow regular folks to bypass the banks, which if you were alive in the GFC is a huge leap forward.

What mechanisms are in place (perhaps a trick question as I'm expecting the answer is "none) to prevent the exchange from telling all 5 customers "sorry it took a while, we could only get you $1k for your coin" and pocketing the extra $22k?

Because the entire blockchain is public record. Anyone can look at it. Example: https://blockchain.info/

The current exchange rate of the day. HSBC doesn't discount. If the exchange rate on that day is 9.187 HKD to 1 EUR, then that is the rate of the transaction. You pay $100 HKD for the wire transfer. That's it. Unlimited money amount.

As far as transaction time, I call bullshit. Blockchain itself says they average about 900 minutes, which would be about 15 hours. So a business day. Of course, when HSBC sends the confirmation to my client (or vendor) that I just wired $XXXXX to them, they typically take it as "credit" because the BANK told them the money is coming - not me. That's as good as a letter of credit. Likewise, so do I. When I receive confirmation of the wire transfer started, I consider the transaction "done" and start the process. And that happens within a few minutes of the wire transfer being started. So - quite a bit faster than Blockchain - per Blockchain.

And good luck using that decentralized currency in China, or soon-to-be several major economies who are choosing to ban Bitcoin and other "crypto" currencies. If you cannot send it at all, then how is it better? At least from HK, or the USA, I can send USD or HKD to any country anywhere, any time - without any restriction.

I was about to say the same, but with some numbers for context:

Currently, about 700,000 people hold 50% of the world's wealth. While that's 700 times the number of people in control compared to BTC, it also $280T or roughly 1000 times the total market cap of BTC.

https://www.usatoday.com/story...
https://blockchain.info/charts...

No there isn't. Businesses mostly use payment gateways that sell the BTC immediately. There's no risk of price fluctuation to the business.

"Immediately" doesn't mean what you think it means. We're talking minutes to hours here which in the financial world is a far cry from "instant" and that means substantial exchange rate risk. On an asset that is fluctuating by double digit percentages within a few days that can mean a very substantial difference in value from the start of an exchange transaction to the finish. Saying there is no risk of price fluctuation is quite simply wrong.

https://blockchain.info/charts...
https://blockchain.info/charts...

So, how is bitcoin not dead now?

http://steamcommunity.com/game...

https://blockchain.info/charts...
https://blockchain.info/charts...

So, how is bitcoin not dead now?

http://steamcommunity.com/game...

Transaction costs are NOT fixed. They grow as the system grows. Perhaps you're thinking of transaction fees? They grow too, but they don't cover all of the transaction costs.

The portion of the costs that the fees don't cover is borne by miners via their electric bills, since validating transactions is a large part of what they do when mining. They'recompensated for their efforts by receiving BTC. In practice, this is more or less a form of arbitrage as they exchange cheap electricity for valuable BTC, and it works fine when the value of BTC remains high against whatever currency they use to pay their electric bill. When the price of BTC slides against traditional currencies, however, those electric bills become outsized compared to the value gained, leaving them holding the bag with mining rigs that are significant sunk costs incapable of delivering a return on their value and that can only be sold at a fraction of what they cost.

In contrast, whether the dollar is strong or the dollar is weak, the cost to validate a cash transaction remains the same: within a rounding error of zero.

https://blockchain.info/charts...

Sorry, what were you saying?

If you actually do the comparison, you see that bitcoin transaction costs (per $1,000 equivalent) is CHEAPER than dollar. It wouldn't work any other way.

Come again? I don't even understand what the unit of measure you're proposing means, but I can already tell you that if you want to understand the cost of transactions, we don't measure them "per $1,000 equivalent". We measure them per transaction.

According to these researchers, each Bitcoin transaction currently costs the equivalent of 9 days worth of energy for an average US household, with that number growing over time as more resources are added to the system. The average US household consumed 10,766 kWh annually in 2016, which we'll assume hasn't shifted much in the last year. The average residential price was 13.30 cents/kWh in September, which we'll assume is comparable to today. Taken together, they suggest that the average US household pays about $1431.878 annually for electricity, or about $3.92/day. As such, a single Bitcoin transaction currently costs the world $35.28 in electricity to process. Other places put the current cost closer to $72-77 per transaction.

In contrast, the cost to process a cash transaction is the amount of time it takes someone to recognize that the dollar bill is now in the seller's hand instead of mine. Or, put differently, effectively zero. That's why we can use cash to purchase everything from a stick of gum to an entire estate.

From those numbers, we can say a few things:
1) Bitcoin is (currently) unviable for small transactions. In fact, if you look at the average transaction value, you'll see that it correlates to the average transaction fee, suggesting that as fees go up, the system becomes unusable for day-to-day purchases, making it unsuitable as a cash replacement. A system only works as a cash replacement when it is capable of scaling from our smallest purchases to our largest purchases while maintaining a cost per transaction that is FAR less than the value of the transaction.

2) Transaction fees don't cover transaction costs. Note that the fees listed in that last chart are far lower than the costs listed in the earlier chart. This is an example of an externalized cost (and explains how the system can work contrary to your claim that it can't work any other way), where someone else is paying for something you're doing. In the case of Bitcoin, it's the miners who are paying the remainder of the costs for each transaction (i.e. their electric bills), but they're paying those electric bills in USD, EUR, GBP, and similar currencies, rather than BTC, which means that their electric bills don't track with fluctuations in the value of BTC. This isn't a problem when BTC valuations are high, since additional miners join in to take advantage of the imbalance (this is more or less a form of arbitrage, exchanging cheap electricity for more valuable BTC). Unfortunately, when BTC valuations slide against the other currencies this becomes a major problem for those miners. Their rigs become sunk costs that are incapable of producing a return on their value and can only be sold for a fraction of what they cost.

3) Transaction costs can exceed their benefits. If you want to buy $15 in groceries and are told every transaction has a $75 fee to confirm your purchase, you won't buy those groceries. You'll wait until you need a lot more before you make the purchase. That's both a good thing (the system discourages wasteful activity) and a bad thing (why are small transactions wasteful in the first place?). If, however, you're told that the cost to confirm the transaction is merely $7.50, you

According to this: https://blockchain.info/de/cha...
we have up to 350k transactions per day. (This has similar numbers: https://www.quandl.com/data/BC...)

So we "waste" 350,000 weeks of american households energy, per day.

Where on the planet are the power plants supporting that?

Transaction times are fine and costs [bitinfocharts.com] are nowhere near what you pay for e.g. SWIFT or Western Union transfers.

https://blockchain.info/charts...
So you think a 142 minute (Oct 20, 2017) confirmation time and $3 transaction fee (Oct 20, 2017) is fine? Maybe if you are buying a house or a pallet of drugs or something. And who uses Western Union other than Nigerian princes?

Yes. In many ways you are correct. I would love for the coin of choice to be CPU or GPU based as opposed to ASIC. But there it is.

Still you have thousands of people who own a few Antminer S5s and S7s and S9s whose combined power make up a pool. Are there some operators with farms of 1000s of ASICS? Yes, of course.

Right now the top 4 pools could, theoretically launch a 51% attack.
https://blockchain.info/pools

No he did not. As soon as someone tells you a wallet address you can see everything that's happening on it, you cannot troll/fake this.

And what's with that transaction done on 2017-08-22? Is it stuck or something?

1000 BTC would be about 3 million USD. That's an order of magnitude, or two, lower than the daily trading volume.

https://blockchain.info/charts...

every transaction is here https://blockchain.info/

The WannaCry payment address has collected just over 17 BTC https://blockchain.info/addres...
May 13 had the lowest bitcoin trading volume in the last 30 days @ around 75k BTC traded.
So, the total number of payments for wannacry equals approximately .022% percent of BTC transactions on the day with the lowest trading volume in the last month. Total payments for wannacry are approximately .0017% of last weeks BTC volume of over 1M BTC. I don't think ransomware is the primary driver of BTC transactions, and statistics support that.

The fees are actually worth at least $50 now. Some people are spending $255,000 worth of Bitcoin for transaction fees now.

Your ability to get a dollar out of the BTC market today for a dollar put in yesterday depends heavily on the participation of others putting their dollars in today. If you examine the data behind the charts https://blockchain.info/charts... and https://blockchain.info/charts... it is very clear that speculative trading has repeatedly driven BTC values up followed by a market value collapse of BTC. People stop putting their money in and instead pull it out and the amount of time it takes to get their money out goes from minutes to days. If there is no speculation and all BTC coins are used for ephemeral transactions, then the total amount of hard currency backing BTC would be around the daily volume of BTC transactions in a day: $1 Billion dollars. However people are behaving as if all of the BTCs are worth $40 Billion dollars. The speculators are the "long-term" holders of BTC, however only a small fraction of their holdings can actually be converted to hard currency before the entire BTC system collapses ... in the 2% range. Everyone is depending on everyone else not to blink, historically not a good bet.

Your ability to get a dollar out of the BTC market today for a dollar put in yesterday depends heavily on the participation of others putting their dollars in today. If you examine the data behind the charts https://blockchain.info/charts... and https://blockchain.info/charts... it is very clear that speculative trading has repeatedly driven BTC values up followed by a market value collapse of BTC. People stop putting their money in and instead pull it out and the amount of time it takes to get their money out goes from minutes to days. If there is no speculation and all BTC coins are used for ephemeral transactions, then the total amount of hard currency backing BTC would be around the daily volume of BTC transactions in a day: $1 Billion dollars. However people are behaving as if all of the BTCs are worth $40 Billion dollars. The speculators are the "long-term" holders of BTC, however only a small fraction of their holdings can actually be converted to hard currency before the entire BTC system collapses ... in the 2% range. Everyone is depending on everyone else not to blink, historically not a good bet.

Not really.

Blockchain size:
https://blockchain.info/charts...

Bitcoin isn't popular yet and the blockchain size has already exponentially mushroomed to over 100GB.

Fanboys like to point out that not everyone needs to have a copy of the block-chain, but that completely negates the 'decentralised' part. IE back to square one with banks running it.

Have you got a few peta-bytes of storage handy for when Bitcoin becomes popular?

TANSTAAFL

> All transactions are recorded in the block chain and supposedly available for inspection by anyone.

Yes, they are. But they only record the sending address, receiving address, and the amount being sent. No names or other personal information. Here, look at a transaction from the most recent block, and tell me anything about the people involved:

https://blockchain.info/tx/ce1...

From the article, it's about 400 sites. Pretty easy to find infected sites with Google, since it changes the home page of the site.

And how does anyone (other than the malware author author) know that nobody has paid them yet?

The ransom is to be paid to a specific bitcoin address, so anyone can look at the blockchain and see how much bitcoin has ever been transferred to that address. The answer being 0 makes the folks in the article pretty confident nothing has been paid so far.

The infected sites appear to be mostly abandoned by their creators, which explains why they're 2 years behind in Drupal 7.x security updates.

there is perhaps about $2.1 trillion USD yet to be mined

DOH! Make that $2.1 billion USD based on the fact that about 75% of available bitcoins have been mined already. Apparently I'm comma-challenged.

These new numbers mean an earth-orbit bitcoin-mining server is definitely a non-starter.

It's already gone down back to normal:

https://blockchain.info/charts...

There are enough people interested in things working that when something does break, the dust eventually settles. Now this isn't ideal, but that's what you have to deal with in exchange of decentralization: when some problem is found you have to convince other people to adopt your fix.

https://blockchain.info/

A bitcoin isn't a "thing". It's an entry in a public ledger that says "wallet X paid wallet Y 0.001BTC". All* the wallets start out at 0 and if you want to see how much money wallet Y has now, you start at the beginning and add all the payments into it and subtract all the payments out of it. Example:

https://blockchain.info/addres...

has 0 BTC balance after receiving 3 payments and making 3 payments (the tiny fraction of a BTC missing each transaction is the fee paid to miners to process it).

As for anonymity, I normally have no way of telling you who 1ENYmn1eCWPa4MFD4VU9wUFqLrzPcqUgaY is. But if one of those payments there was made from an ATM that converts money to BTC (and takes a photo) or one of those debits was sent to a drug dealer who mailed the drugs to the wallet owner's home address, then got busted by the cops who got a customer list, then it could be figured out.

https://blockchain.info/

A bitcoin isn't a "thing". It's an entry in a public ledger that says "wallet X paid wallet Y 0.001BTC". All* the wallets start out at 0 and if you want to see how much money wallet Y has now, you start at the beginning and add all the payments into it and subtract all the payments out of it. Example:

https://blockchain.info/addres...

has 0 BTC balance after receiving 3 payments and making 3 payments (the tiny fraction of a BTC missing each transaction is the fee paid to miners to process it).

As for anonymity, I normally have no way of telling you who 1ENYmn1eCWPa4MFD4VU9wUFqLrzPcqUgaY is. But if one of those payments there was made from an ATM that converts money to BTC (and takes a photo) or one of those debits was sent to a drug dealer who mailed the drugs to the wallet owner's home address, then got busted by the cops who got a customer list, then it could be figured out.

Yeah but your counter argument doesn't account for the sheer scale of what VISA and the banking system do compared to Bitcoin. OK the banking system uses more electricity, but what is the amortized cost on a per transaction basis? That's the question. Accoring to TFA the answer is VISA is HUGELY more environmentally friendly and cost effective than Bitcoin and, and this is the point, always will be because by design Bitcoin makes it harder to obtain coins depending on how much processing power (energy) is being expended to obtain those coins at any given time.

http://motherboard.vice.com/re...

If all bitcoin machines went solar however, then we might have a different outcome. The practicalities of that, given that Bitcoin assumes distribution of computing power, are not in Bitcoin's favor either.

Proof of work through ASICs is a very good security mechanism as attackers must spend real money on machines and electricty to attack the network and create 2-3 double spends before being caught and shutdown, but not the only method.

Already there are inter-channel payment protocols (https://lightning.network/lightning-network-paper-DRAFT-0.5.pdf and http://impulse.is/impulse.pdf are two examples among many) and off the chain transactions (Coinbase/circle/changetip are a few examples where there is no fee and wildly used). Right now there is ~118k transactions per day - https://blockchain.info/charts... but in reality the number of bitcoin transactions per day is much much higher as those numbers represent on the chain transactions. with the lighting network Bitcoin will be able to scale to higher levels of transactions per day than VISA , and without having to similarity increase the amount of ASIC's because those payment channels use multisig and ricardian contracts to secure while being ultimately backed up by PoW on the main chain.

Additionally, be aware that wasted electricity will start to be recycled as heaters(Whether hot water or space heaters). I already have some friends doing this to save on their heating bills and make money at the same time.

...facilitated by online anonymity and cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin.

You mean the same anonymity that allows anyone to check all transactions ever done on a Bitcoin* wallet?

* and other similar crypto-currencies as well.

from what I can see the loss you would make by keeping bitcoin for the last 12 months is exponentially worse than inflation on a bank account.
https://blockchain.info/charts...

It's been pretty steady for a while now

We have different definitions of "pretty steady".. Even just looking at last 60 days there is a 40% difference from lowest to highest value. To put money into that is not pretty steady, it is highly speculative.

There's nothing subjective about the fact that you could, as some particular time not specified by the summary, exchange those 650,000 bitcoins (not "bit coins" as the summary would have it) for $370m.

No, there was never such a time. When MtGox collapsed there was less than 13 million bitcoins total, most of which is being hoarded. Looking at the exchange trade volume there's maybe $5-10 million dollar daily liquidity. In order to sell out without the market crashing you probably couldn't sell more than 10% of that so it'd take years to cash out. And that's assuming you don't overdo it and spook the herd so they all cash out too.

Paper can be thrown away.. Hidden.. burned.. counted wrong.. etc.. Not everybody can verify the paper. No matter what, with paper, you are trusting it in the hands of a few. You cannot cheat the blockchain. Further, you can make a paper printout with the blockchain that has a web address where any average Joe can in fact verify that he voted for Turd Sandwich.. with a date and everything.

https://blockchain.info/tx-ind... Here is an example of one of my Bitcoin wallet transactions. Notes can be entered for each Wallet location that show what candidate they are (or business.. or whatever). For the life of Bitcoin, that transaction cannot be changed or recorded differently.

For the average Joe to verify, it's as simple as him going to a website he feels he can trust, clicking the 'verify my vote' button.. and typing in his unique voting hash from his printout. The average Joe does not need the same experience it takes to program fucking Bitcoin just as the average Joe right now does not need the experience of counting the whole US set of votes to feel good about his paper ballot.

Like I said, there's probably 1000 different ways voting can be done using the blockchain.. while still making it simple for the average Joe.

..ought be enough for anybody.

And I wouldn't call it a "low-cost payment solution" with a cost of 15 USD per transaction: https://blockchain.info/charts/cost-per-transaction

Here is the new owners address- https://blockchain.info/addres... It is funny reading some of the spam comments sent to the blockchain before and after.

The claim "we may never know who bought the confiscated coins" is wrong.

The original address of these bitcoin is well documented, so they are be easily traced once they are transfered.

1Ez69SnzzmePmZX3WpEzMKTrcBF2gpNQ55

1i7cZdoE9NcHSdAL5eGjmTJbBVqeQDwgw

The claim "we may never know who bought the confiscated coins" is wrong.

The original address of these bitcoin is well documented, so they are be easily traced once they are transfered.

1Ez69SnzzmePmZX3WpEzMKTrcBF2gpNQ55

1i7cZdoE9NcHSdAL5eGjmTJbBVqeQDwgw

I'm stating verifiable fact, not saying that anyone shoudl buy them now.

See the histories here, for how many bitcoin were in circulation, and here for their USD price history. Prior to approximately Feb 2011 bitcoin were less than $1, yet there were 5m available at that time. Buying 100 for £20 around that time was easily doable, and now, not even at the peak of over $1000, they would be worth north of $60,000.

I'm stating verifiable fact, not saying that anyone shoudl buy them now.

See the histories here, for how many bitcoin were in circulation, and here for their USD price history. Prior to approximately Feb 2011 bitcoin were less than $1, yet there were 5m available at that time. Buying 100 for £20 around that time was easily doable, and now, not even at the peak of over $1000, they would be worth north of $60,000.

Researchers at Cornell say something, that doesn't mean it is true. See for example, https://blockchain.info/pools. It seems what they are saying is that there were a few specific periods of time where GHash was doing 51% of the work. Most of the time this isn't the case though.